The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Hello, everyone.

And new warm greetings and

sitting here with you, wishing you all a meaningful meditation or a satisfying one.

Even when it's not satisfying, though, it can be quite beneficial.

Sometimes even more beneficial because the very things that make meditation difficult

are often the very things that mindfulness is useful to bring mindfulness to.

It might be very important to be mindful of and learn something new, find a new way,

be with oneself in a productive way with a difficulty.

So, one of the common descriptions of mindfulness practice you find here in the West

is that it's a form of acceptance practice.

And maybe so, and I'll talk more about that later.

But right now I'd like to offer you a very important baseline

orientation for doing Buddhist meditation, for doing mindfulness practice

that is akin to acceptance in a certain way, but doesn't require doing something.

And often people have the impression that a meditation is a lot about doing.

Sometimes acceptance is understood as a ceasing of a lot of the doing that we do.

And in a sense, that's what I want to emphasize today, that as you do the meditation today,

rather than trying to focus so much on being mindful, rather than focusing a lot on some ideal

like to be compassionate for yourself or kind to yourself, focus on non-harming.

Being attentive enough to track what your mind does, the thoughts, the attitudes, the motivations,

...